As DrupalCon tradition goes, on Thursday, 18-Feb-2016 started with summits (for business, government, education, and community) and a whole lot of training sessions including the Developer Contest by Azri Solutions.

DAY 2

Friday (19th Feb, 2016) started with a prenote, to say this was hilarious, and people got involved in the activity, at the end the audience was invited to do a Indian style flash mob, and the stage was totally crowded.

Prenote was followed by an introduction byHolly Ross, a guide to pronouncing Drupal 8 by Sunit Gala and then featured the keynote by Dries, the Founder of Drupal, along with headline presentations by luminaries in the Drupal community including other major highlight were the learning opportunities on Drupal 8.

Followed by the keynote were day packed with sessions each categorically falls under one of four different, highly relevant tracks: Case Studies, Contributions, Business, and Coding and Development. We (DCKAP team) actively attended the following sessions –

Everything multilingual in Drupal 8 – Drupal 8 is a truly outstanding CMS for anyone who needs to build websites and applications in any language, but especially those making multilingual sites. This session showed around all the great improvements in Drupal 8 and gave tips about how to best utilize the new solutions.

Drupal 8 with Backbone, and Underscore – This session covered Backbone.js and Underscore.js, the JavaScript frameworks that are included in Drupal 8. Also covered at how they are used in core, how they can be extended in D8, API connections, and more.

Drupal – The perfect front-end for document management – This session demonstrated the concepts of two document management systems and their benefits.

Hooks, Events, Plugins, and Services: Pick the right tool for the job – This session provided an introduction to the various new ways to extend Drupal including Plugins, events, tagged services, and explain what problem they solve, and how to pick the right tool for the job.

Make your code do your job – This session provided best way to improve our productivity as a developer by making PHP language do most of the work. With PHP 7’s improved typing support that is now even easier than ever.

Besides the sessions, the environment in sponsors area was just crazy a lot of people trying to hire people and getting new leads for new projects.

DAY 3

Saturday (20th Feb,2016) , day started with a keynote by Danese Cooper and her talk was about milestones in the Drupal project and Open source in India, giving recognition to leaders in India community: it was a good way to encourage local community. After the keynote, volunteers and local organizers, performed a break out dance using India songs, it was magnificent; they used the stage and aisles.

Similar to Day-2 , there were interesting technical/non-technical sessions. We (DCKAP team) actively attended the following sessions.

The Drupal 8 Theming Experience – The goal of the session was to dive a bit deeper into some of the changes and talk about how and why they were changed in Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 Site building: Coding vs. Clicking – This session reviewed the current status of Drupal 8 core and contrib. layout solutions (Panels, Page Manager, Display Suite, Context), Learned about advantages and disadvantages between site building via the GUI or via “code” and discussed pros and cons for both site building approaches regarding deployment across development environments.

Decoupled Drupal with React – This session was geared towards front-end developers and engineers who were interested in decoupled architectures with Drupal and up-and-coming JavaScript frameworks. No prior knowledge of React was assumed, but strong familiarity with JavaScript was necessary.

Build Mobile Applications with Headless Drupal 8 – This session talked about what is Headless Drupal and why we should care. It also covered how to use it to build Mobile applications.

Migration to Drupal 8 – This session talked about what goes into planning a data migration from Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 to 8 and how to create Custom Migration Plugins for custom or contributed modules of Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 so that they can be easily migrated to Drupal 8.

DAY 4

Sunday (21st Feb,2016) – was a Big Sprint Day – The biggest sprint day where each one irrespective of their role either a site builder, designer, programmer, theme builder, technical writer, usability specialist, or project manager, if we have worked with Drupal in some capacity, this was a chance to contribute back to the Drupal community. We (DCKAP team) actively attended the “First-time sprinter workshop” – this hands-on workshop covered the basics of contribution essentials like the Drupal.org issue queues and IRC, and optionally GIT and setting up Drupal 8 on our laptop.

Day ended with a ‘Closing session” by bidding a farewell to DrupalCon Asia Mumbai.